Which is odd considering that the iPhone should be released in 3 Arabic speaking countries; Egypt, Jordan and Qatar. And there will always be a potential for other Arabic speaking countries that have an interest for the iPhone.
Over 200 million speak Arabic compared to any of the other languages listed, Arabic is a major language. Will Apple release a late update to add Arabic support or will they just ignore the Arabic language like they did with the Mac OS (first party Arabic localization) and iPod all these years?

4 comments

Hello Khaled, nice blog!
I’m a Doha-based journalist. Was disappointed about the lack of Arabic support too. Does not make any sense to support Polish (with its 40 million speakers), for instance, and not support Arabic.

Anyway, I was thinking of buying a MacBook from the US because it is much cheaper than here in Qatar. But will adding Arabic be a problem to the English-configured system? Also, do you suggest I wait for a possibly looming upgrade or with the end of June in silence, the nearest upgrade would probably come in September? What do you think.

There are about 6 million Finnish speakers and they got the language support. The Arabic speaking market is huge and only Nokia got it right.

Adding Arabic to a Mac is just about adding Arabic input, there are no “first party Arabic localizations” from Apple directly.
Unless you care about a full Arabic keyboard, go ahead and buy it from the US.

The Arabic support is a common problem in Apple products. The Arabization for Leopard is still have some issues. Also, many major products for Apple like Microsoft Office 2004 or 2008 are still don’t support Arabic.